The Girl From His Town Part 8

"Yes, Miss," her woman urged, "don't stand here."

But the actress waited nevertheless and said to Dan: "Who's the girl?"

"What girl?"

"Why, the girl you come here every night to see and are too shy to speak to. Everybody is crazy to know."

Letty Lane looked like a little girl herself in the crocheted garment her small hands held across her breast. Dan put his arm on her shoulder without realizing the familiarity of his gesture:

"Get out of this draft-get out of it quick, I say," and pushed her toward her room.

"Gracious, but you are strong." She felt the muscular touch, and his hand flat against her shoulder was warm through the wool.

"I wish _you_ were strong. You work too darned hard."

Her head was covered with the coral cap and feather. Dan saw her billowy skirt, her silken hose, her little coral shoes. She fluttered at the door which Higgins opened.

"Why haven't you been to see me?" she asked him. "You are not very polite."

"I am coming in now."

"Not a bit of it. I'm too busy, and it is a short entr'acte. Go and see the girl you came here to see."

Dan thought that the reason she forbade him to come in was because Prince Poniotowsky waited for her in her dressing-room. It was his first jealous moment, and the feeling fell on him with a swoop, and its fangs fastened in him with a stinging pain. He stammered:

"I didn't come to see any girl here but you. I came to see you."

"Come to-morrow at two, at the Savoy."

But before Dan realized his own precipitation, he had seized the door-handle as Letty Lane went within and was about to close her room against him, and said quickly:

"I'm coming right in now."

"Why, I never heard of such a thing," she answered sharply, angrily; "you must be crazy! Take away your hand!" And hers, as well as his, seized the handle of the door. Her small ice-cold hand brought him to his senses.

"I beg your pardon," he murmured confusedly. "Do go in and get warm if you can."

But instead of obeying, now that the rude young man withdrew his importuning, Miss Lane's hands fell from the k.n.o.b, and close to his eyes she swayed before him, and Dan caught her in his arms-went into her room, carrying her. He had been wrong about Prince Poniotowsky; save for Higgins, the room was empty. The woman, though she exclaimed, showed no great surprise and seemed prepared for such a fainting spell. Dan laid the actress on the sofa and then the dresser said to him:

"Please go, sir; I can quite manage. She has these turns often. I'll give her brandy. She will be quite right."

But Dan hesitated, looking at the bit of humanity that he had laid with great gentleness on the divan covered with pillows. Letty Lane lay there, small as a little child, inanimate as death. It was hard to think the quiet little form could contain such life, fire and motion, or that this senseless little creature held London with her voice and grace.

Higgins knelt down by Letty Lane's side, quiet, capable, going about the business of resuscitating her lady much as she laced the singer's bodice and shoes. "If you would be so good as to open the door, sir, and send me a call page. They'll have to linger out this entr'acte or put on some feature."

"But," exclaimed Blair, "she can't go back to-night?"

"Lord, yes," Higgins returned. "Here, Miss Lane; drink this."

At the door where he paused, Dan saw the girl lifted up, saw her lean on Higgins' shoulder, and a.s.sured then that she was not lifeless in good truth, he went out to do as Higgins had asked him. In a quarter of an hour the curtain rose and within half an hour Dan, from his box, saw the actress dance to the rajah her charming polka to the strains of the Hungarian Band.

CHAPTER X-THE BOY FROM MY TOWN

He went the next day to see Letty Lane at the Savoy and learned that she was too ill to receive him. Mrs. Higgins in the sitting-room told him so.

Dan liked the big cordial face of the Scotch-woman who acted as companion, dresser and maid for the star. Mrs. Higgins had an affable face, one that welcomes, and she made it plain that she was not an enemy to this young caller.

The visitor, in his blue serge clothes, was less startling than most of the men that came to see her mistress.

"She works too hard, doesn't she?"

"She does everything too hard, sir."

"She ought to rest."

"I doubt if she does, even in her grave," returned Higgins. "She is too full of motion. She is like the little girl in the fairy book that danced in her grave."

Dan didn't like this comparison.

"Can't you make her hold up a little?"

Higgins smiled and shook her head.

Letty Lane's sitting-room was as full of roses as a flower garden. There were quant.i.ties of theatrical photographs in silver and leather frames on the tables and the piano. Signed portraits from crowned heads; pictures of well-known worldly men and women whom the dancer had charmed. But a full-length picture of Letty Lane herself in one of the dresses of _Mandalay_ lay on the table near Dan, and he picked it up.

She smiled at him enchantingly from the cardboard, across which was written in her big, das.h.i.+ng hand: "For the Boy from _my_ Town. Letty Lane."

Dan glanced up at Mrs. Higgins.

"Why, that looks as though this were for me."

The dressing woman nodded. "Miss Lane thought she would be able to see you to-day."

The picture in his hand, Dan gazed at it rapturously.

"I'm from Blairtown, Montana, where she came from."

"So she told me, sir."

He laid the picture back on the table, and Higgins understood that he wanted Miss Lane to give it to him herself. She led him affably to the door and affably smiled upon him. She had a frill in her hand, a thimble on her finger, and a lot of needles in her bodice. She looked motherly and useful. Blair liked to think of her with Letty Lane. He put his hand in his pocket, but she saw his gesture and reproved him quietly: "No, no, sir, please, I never do. I am just as much obliged," and her face remained so affable that Blair was not embarra.s.sed by her refusal. His parting words were:

"Now, you make her take care of herself."

And to please him, as she opened the door, she pleasantly a.s.sured him that she would do her very best.

Dan went out of the Savoy feeling that he had left something of himself behind him in the motley room of an actress with its perfumed atmosphere of roses and violets. The photograph which he had laid down on the table seemed to look out at him again, and he repeated delightedly, "That one was for me, all right! I'm the 'boy from her town' and no mistake." And he thought of her as she had lain, lifelessly and pale on the dressing-room sofa, under the touch of hired hands, and how, no doubt, she had been lying in her room when he called to-day, with shades drawn, resting before the long hard evening, when London would be amused by her, delighted by her, charmed by her voice, by her body and her grace.

He had wandered up as far as Piccadilly, went into a florist's and stood before the flowers. Her sitting-room had been full of roses, but Dan chose something else that had caught his eye from the window,-a huge country basket of primroses, smelling of the earth and the spring. He sent them with his card and wrote on it, "To the Girl from My Town," and sent the gift with a pleasure as young and as fresh as was his own heart.